You have encountered Abstract Art.

Has it been two weeks already? Tracking the Steam Summer Sale and playing around with shaders in GameMaker: Studio can really make you lose track of time.

Sometimes I tweet stuff on Twitter if the aforementioned stuff isn’t substantial enough to be turned in a full blog post. If you haven’t done so already, you can keep track of those tweets on the sidebar on the right side of this blog or follow me on Twitter.

If you have been following on Twitter, then you’ll probably already know that I signed-up for and got into the ROM Game Jam, the first ever game jam to be hosted by the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto on August 9-11. I am part of the same team that was making That Which Binds Us. I say “was” because we’re focusing our efforts on the ROM Game Jam now, so That Which Binds Us has been put on hiatus for now.

Another tweet I made was about shaders. Wait, I already mentioned that above. Anyway, I downloaded some shader scripts from this forum post on the Game Maker Community forums and, just for fun and curiosity, applied them to Gonna Catcha‘s drawing code. Although it wasn’t its main purpose, but the graphics code modifications I had previously done also allows me to apply a shader to the entire screen, but I wanted to do that anyway. Two birds with one stone I guess.

Here are the results of my shader experiment:

Once you’ve regained your composure from watching the trippy and completely unnecessary graphical effects, you may notice something new in the video. The game randomly places rocks in the maze that act as destructible walls. (Rocks?! I thought they were just blobs!) This is to slow the player down and allow the spirits to better disperse throughout the maze. However, the rock impede the spirits as well, making the whole thing kind of pointless. Of course, they’re spirits; so my plan B would just have them, you know, pass through the rocks unimpeded. Preta can stay impeded by rocks, being corporal beings like the players.

One other big change I made to the game that might not be obvious in the video is the player movement code/rules. Previously, the players had free movement; now their movement is restricted to the grid much like the spirits and preta are. I did this to make turning around corners easier for the players. My previous solution had the players snap to a corridor if they were “close enough” to turn into one; it looked a bit weird and was a bit finicky.

Re-writing and messing around with the movement code did produce some amusing bugs in the process, something that hasn’t happened in a while.

(Wow, this post was longer than I thought. And I was worried that I wouldn’t have anything to write about! Harumph!)